Offering to negotiate with Islamic terrorists is a statement of weakness. Jihadists only offer to negotiate out of fear, weakness or to entrap us, and they assume we do the same thing. Nothing would ever convince them that we genuinely want to live in peace with them, or that we prefer alternatives to violence. So any time we offer to negotiate, they see it as weakness or a trick.
U.S. President-elect Donald Trump on Saturday demanded that BRICS member countries commit to not creating a new currency or supporting another currency that would replace the United States dollar or face 100% tariffs, Reuters reported.
“We require a commitment from these Countries that they will neither create a new BRICS Currency, nor back any other Currency to replace the mighty U.S. Dollar or, they will face 100% Tariffs, and should expect to say goodbye to selling into the wonderful U.S. Economy,” Trump wrote on his social media platform, Truth Social.
Russian President Vladimir Putin approved budget plans, raising 2025 military spending to record levels as Moscow seeks to prevail in the war in Ukraine.
Around 32.5% of the budget posted on a government website Sunday has been allocated for national defense, amounting to over $145 billion, up from a reported 28.3% this year.
After years of failed military efforts, the path forward has to include some kind of accommodation with the militants.
Since at least 2017, when Mali’s government organised a peace forum called the Conference of National Understanding, prominent voices in the country and the wider Sahel region have explored the possibility of dialogue with jihadists.
“All we seek is a safe place, but unfortunately we found ourselves in another war.”
Thousands of Eritrean and Sudanese refugees are demanding to be relocated from unsafe camps in Ethiopia’s conflict-hit Amhara region, where they say they lack basic services and are subject to almost daily attacks from local militiamen and armed bandits.
The African continent saw a significant increase in coups in the last three years, with military figures carrying out takeovers in Gabon, Niger, Burkina Faso, Sudan, Guinea, Chad and Mali.
After Niger’s coup in July, the regional Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) said it would not tolerate another takeover, and implemented tough sanctions and threatened military action to restore that country’s democratically elected government.
For almost a decade, US troops have been on the ground in Syria to assist Kurdish-led forces in the defeat of the infamous Islamic State. These forces tamp down on the ISIS remnants in the northern and eastern regions they presently control, where tens of thousands of captured ISIS fighters, their families and suspected affiliates remain in open-air camps and prisons.
Abstract: Since 2018, the United States has been trying to figure out what counterterrorism looks like during an era of strategic competition, and how it can maximize and optimize returns from its counterterrorism investments. There are important differences between these two national security priorities—strategic competition and counterterrorism—but if the United States wants to gain resource efficiencies, it should look across the gray space at how and where these two priorities interplay and converge. This is because a key part of the pathway to CT optimization lies in realizing how counterterrorism has evolved as a form of influence. This article introduces a conceptual framework to help the counterterrorism community situate the returns from CT investments, especially deployed CT force activity. It recommends that those returns be understood through two lenses: 1) those that are direct and oriented around threat mitigation and 2) those that are intersectional and oriented around influence. Interviews with three experts provide context to elements of the framework and highlight the interplay between counterterrorism and strategic competition in different regional areas.
Abstract: When it comes to counterterrorism, the United States has been living through an inflection point. It wants to focus less on terrorism so it can place more emphasis on strategic competition, but key terrorist adversaries remain committed. The terrorism landscape and the approaches used by key terror adversaries have also been evolving. The United States and its partners have been placing various forms of pressure against priority networks such as the Islamic State and al-Qa`ida in key locations to keep the threats these groups pose degraded, and to restrict their ability to conduct external operations and other impactful acts of terror. But over the past two years, there have been growing signs that the Islamic State is evolving around the pressure that has been placed against it, developments that highlight the limits of existing CT pressure approaches and the need for those approaches to evolve. This article introduces two frameworks: 1) a framework to help conceptualize non-state VEO power and CT pressure efforts to degrade those elements of power and 2) a defense and degradation in depth framework that can be used to help strategically guide future CT pressure campaigns. It is hoped that these frameworks provoke debate within the counterterrorism community and that they help the United States and its allies adjust their CT approaches so they can evolve to stay ahead of the threat.
À quoi ressemblera le mouvement de masse du futur proche ?
Cinq hypothèses, mais aucune d’elles n’est passionnante
L’idée d’une « fabrication de la politique » est une invention de l’époque contemporaine.
L’idée que le peuple en tant que tel est en charge du destin du monde est en effet l’enfant de l’avènement de la bourgeoisie, de l’urbanisation et, enfin, de la société de masse et/ou de consommation.